Simply put, this is a superb disc. Artists and repertoire are a perfect match – and what repertoire! Schubert’s Quintet is one of those pieces where every idea is musical gold and the juxtaposition of those ideas creates a totally captivating masterpiece. No matter that the work lasts some 55 minutes: chronological time seems hardly to register at all. In fact, there are moments (like the outer sections of the second-movement Adagio) where time seems utterly suspended and we are given a glimpse of eternity. This extraordinary outpouring from the very end of Schubert’s all too brief life is given a deeply thoughtful and beautifully polished reading by the Takács with guest cellist Ralph Kirshbaum, who fits seamlessly into the musical fabric. Underpinning the many glories of this recording is an exceptional sense of ensemble that generates the most finely gradated variations in timbre and texture. (The first two movements abound in wonderful examples of subtle colouring.) From the very first chord that emerges from sonic darkness, it is clear that the players will not shy away from probing the complexity of emotion that Schubert presents in this piece. The constantly changing light and shade of the music is movingly…

Staging Wagner’s epic four-part Der Ring Des Nibelungen is the greatest challenge that an opera house can face. The Met’s latest effort, staged by Canadian director Robert Lepage, has been taken out of the opera house and into cinemas all over the world, and is now available in an 8-DVD set. The live performances have taken a bit of a critical battering so how does the small-screen release stack up? First of all, the positives: this is the best looking, best sounding and generally one of the best sung Ring Cycles that you will find.  The high-definition picture is breathtaking in its clarity, while the sound is beautifully engineered to give a wide, natural perspective. The singers have clearly all been miked and every word comes over loud and clear, regardless of stage position or volume of orchestra. The conducting is of a high level, too, with James Levine’s 40 years of experience paying dividends in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, while Fabio Luisi is a solid substitute in Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. Lepage’s brief was to produce something traditional enough to satisfy the Met’s conservative support base while utilising his reputation for visual wizardry to realise Wagner’s dream for the…

Australian audiences experienced Alina Ibragimova’s light, luminous tone firsthand in her recitals with pianist Cédric Tiberghien. It’s a sound as suited to the beloved Mendelssohn concerto as the 27-year-old violinist is to her partners on this disc, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. On gut strings, this warhorse is leavened with much-needed finesse. Ibragimova launches straight into the first movement’s Molto Appassionato with sweetly focused tone – no need to milk that aching, Jewish-sounding melody when it unfolds so simply. She lingers tantalisingly on lyrical phrases, but dispatches fast passages with whiplike agility (if a little less warmth), only occasionally on the verge of getting ahead of herself. It’s that balance of impetuous zeal reeled in by cool, crisp discipline that makes this young firebrand such an exciting performer. Her cadenza is heart-on-sleeve with some very exposed playing – delicate but not lacking in energy – and the riccochet passage passes through ear-bending dynamic gradation before melting back into the main theme of the orchestral recapitulation. Throughout most of the recording Ibragimova uses vibrato sparingly but judiciously. It’s a little soppy in the tranquil Andante, but still a palate cleanser compared to sickly sweet James Ehnes on Onyx. The…

The queen of classical concept albums continues her reign with this collection of Baroque arias, all written for royal women in various states of turmoil and distress. DiDonato’s last Baroque disc, Furore, was all about Handel, but this time the focus is on less familiar composers, whose show-stopping scenas, inspired by the great divas of their era, have DiDonato’s name written all over them. Her warm, down-to-earth persona may not immediately suggest the imperiousness of royalty, but these arias catch queens at their most fragile and human – not to mention their most virtuosic – and DiDonato’s patented blend of vulnerability, visceral energy and sheer agility is precisely what they need. The opening track, Orlandini’s stormy Da torbida procella, finds her in whirlwind mode; but it is the following aria, Porta’s Madre diletta, with its plaintive melismas and gossamer pianissimi, which really sets the seal on this album’s success. As thrilling as DiDonato undoubtedly is at high speed, in this case the disc’s gentler moments are some of its most arresting: Keiser’s simple, radiant Lasciami piangere is a hushed gem, almost eclipsing Cleopatra’s much more familiar lament, Piangerò. Giacomelli’s Sposa son disprezzata – commonly but erroneously credited to Vivaldi, who……

It’s been a long time coming but at last Ligeti’s 1978 “anti-anti-opera” Le Grand Macabre arrives on DVD in a revolutionary staging by Barcelona’s innovative urban theatre troupe, La Fura Dels Baus. Nekrotzar, the Grand Macabre of the title, arrives in Breugheland (inspired by the Dutch painter Pieter Breughel’s nightmarish visions), and announces the end of the world.  In the face of a population entirely absorbed with sex, alcohol and petty politics, however, his apocalypse fails to materialise and life goes on as before.  Very much an opera for today, I would argue. This visually compelling production was a highlight of the 2010 Adelaide Festival and has been a hit wherever it has played. We begin with a giant video image of a woman watching TV, surrounded by cigarette ends and gorging on a burger.  A sudden seizure and she falls to the floor, her atrophied body metamorphosing into a giant three-dimensional set. This massive corpse is peopled by Ligeti’s grotesque cast of characters who crawl over her flanks, make love in her eye-sockets and enter her various orifices (even at one point from out of her giant vagina). Most remarkably though, the body is used as a giant projection…

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was one of the 18th century’s great musical rebels, working in a revolutionary and transitional period but destined to be overshadowed by others. History has a way of doing that to composers who don’t fit neatly into boxes. His father Johann Sebastian Bach and Mozart, geniuses both, perfectly reflect their times. Emanuel Bach may have been just as gifted, but he is neither Baroque fish nor Classical fowl and only now, it seems, are we really beginning to recognise his unique talents. Eschewing the single-emotion-per-movement model of his father’s generation, he revels in veering from one mood to another, juxtaposing introspection with temperamental outbursts and exploring divergent rhythms and quirky harmonies. Revered by Mozart, this is music that at times reaches beyond Classicism into the turbulence of Beethoven and the Romantic period. In short, CPE Bach was quite a visionary. There are four Sonatas here, the first dating from 1744 (Emanuel’s most radical period) while the latest work, a Fantasie, dates from 1787, the year before he died. The early F-Sharp Minor Sonata begins with a highly unsettling movement, playing off an unstable rhythmic motive against an endearing gallant tune. His kaleidoscopic treatment of these two…

The Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire made his initial impression on collectors with a recording of music by his compatriot Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959). That Teldec disc included the Prole do Bebê Suites and the massive Rudepoema. After partnering Martha Argerich in two-piano works, Freire was absent from the catalogues for two decades, finally to reappear with a series of acclaimed recordings of Beethoven and Brahms. Now, after 40 years, he returns to the music of his homeland. The result is playing of such freshness, spontaneity and vigour that you would think no time had passed. This disc is clearly a labour of love. While Villa-Lobos gets the lion’s share of the generous program, it also contains pieces by older composers, which Freire tells us have been in his repertoire since he was a teenager (he was born in 1944). Among these are the Tango Brasileiro by the un-Hispanically named Alexandre Levy, the Valse Lent by Henrique Fernández and Camargo Guarnieri’s popular Dança Negro. While they don’t have the profile of Villa-Lobos, the other composers represented here are hardly unknown, as the sleeve note claims. Villa-Lobos selections include the bubbling Carnaval das Crianças, more familiar in its piano and orchestra version under…

Messiaen described his ten-movement Turangalîla Symphonie (1947-1949) as a song of love, a hymn to joy. Yet a bitter history informs the piece. Fierce irony shapes and drives a startling barrage of traditional and exotic instruments, creating images in the manner of medieval carnival with its mockery of prevailing social orders where comic forms took new and often sinister meanings. In this charged performance with Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor Juanjo Mena captures the agitation in the work, even catching a sardonic gleam in the composer’s eye. At times, Turangalîla weaves covertly through aggressive forces manoeuvring for narrative dominance. At others it is barefaced, springing from memories of unimaginable horrors the composer endured in a German concentration camp a few years earlier. Mena’s vision of this music is sharp; familiar emotional territory for a conductor born in Vitoria, in northern Spain’s fiercely independent Basque country. With his team of Nordic musicians, he unleashes a phantasmagoric cacophony of jeering whistles, wails and screams. British pianist Steven Osborne is ferociously focused as a major and constant solo voice threading through the drama of contrasting cycles, by turns frenzied and gentle. It is relieved by plaintive, otherworldly cries of anguished love from the ondes…

It’s not often that an aria disc has you dancing, but this adventurous album from Patricia Petibon might just do the trick. The French soprano has combined two of her musical passions – Spanish music and the Baroque – into one program, in which 17th- and 18th-century arias and folksongs from England, France, Spain and Latin America mingle with gay abandon. Dance rhythms and catchy tunes abound, from the seguidilla of José de Nebra’s En amor, pastorcillos, to the chaconne of Charpentier’s Sans frayeur dans ces bois to the zippy French folksong J’ai vu le loup, which comes complete with bagpipes and historically informed pronunciation. There’s typical Baroque fare too, chosen to reflect the Old World’s fascination with the New: arias from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Charpentier’s Médée and Rameau’s i, all of them set in farflung lands. It’s a diverse program, whose varied strands intertwine in fascinating ways. Dido’s Lament, for instance, is an intriguing companion to Le Bailly’s Yo soy la locura, and it’s interesting to hear Handel’s Spanish aria No se emenderá jámas amid its native counterparts. Petibon brings her own lively artistry to the mix, moving easily between Old World and New. She has the depth…

It’s tempting to think of John Cage as the dangerous, if smiling, radical. After all, he did pioneer the prepared piano, welcomed turntables and radios into the concert hall, and scored the most famous four-and-a-half minutes of silence in history. Unlike his close colleague Morton Feldman, however, the musicality of his work is easily overlooked. This haunting recording from ECM reminds us of the colour, precision and sheer beauty of his compositions. The pieces are mostly from Cage’s early rhythmic period, the 1930s and ‘40s, and are for solo piano or prepared piano with occasional voice. Pianist Alexei Lubimov is a significant proponent of 20th-century music in Russia, giving premieres of pieces by Boulez, Stockhausen and Ligeti; by the time he met Cage in 1988, he had been playing this music for decades. He is also known for his Haydn and Mozart, and to that end brings a considered, even classical approach to Cage’s work. The opening Dream of 1948 sets a tone of hypnotising reverie. By contrast, the chiming pieces for prepared piano, such as the buoyant The Unavailable Memory Of, are rhythmically repetitive; other works are a little more astringent and evoke Cage’s teacher Schoenberg and the ghost…

Ever since she won two major competitions as a 16-year-old nearly two decades ago, Natalie Clein has had a reputation in her native Britain not just as one of the finest cellists going around but also as one of the most intelligent, a fact borne out in her extraordinary previous recording of music by Kodály. But that acclaimed disc – one of only a handful of commercial recordings she’s made in her entire career – was only a warm-up for this magnificent new CD of masterpieces for cello and orchestra by Bloch and Bruch. In her succinct addition to the main liner notes, Clein describes Bloch’s “deep sense of longing and loneliness” – qualities which are more than demonstrated in a stunning reading of the immortal Schelomo. The very first notes on solo cello sear the soul, before burning their way deep down in a rich sound mix, and when Ilan Volkov fires up the BBC Scottish Symphony in the big tuttis it’s almost overwhelming. Clein has a way of making the cello wailand keen like a lamenting voice drifting in from some windswept hill, wild and untamed in its spirit but with never a note out of place. And…

As regular readers will know, I’ve often been unimpressed by Gergiev’s sadly variable LSO Mahler cycle, where he often had even less to say about the music than Ashkenazy. I’m happy to say I was entranced by this 2-CD set from beginning to end. For once, the cliché “unjustly neglected” is totally accurate in describing the shameful overlooking of these three genuine masterpieces. The First and Third have long been my favourite Tchaikovsky symphonies; until now my preferred version of No 1 was the youthful Michael Tilson Thomas with his Boston forces, and in the Third either Bernstein’s 1960s New York Philharmonic or Karajan’s 1980s Berlin Phil. Gergiev’s First, Winter Daydreams, is simply gorgeous. The combination of panache, finesse and imagination in the first movement is wonderful: you can almost feel the chill on the rosy cheeks of Romanov aristocrats with exquisite noses and perfect cheekbones, as they travel through the wondrous winter landscape, swathed in sable in a troika. The tender phrasing of the second subject is worth the price of the set alone. The second movement is a wistful reverie and the scherzo is jewel-like. I’ve often regarded the Second Symphony, the so-called Little Russian, aka Ukraine, as…